More businesses report emailed bomb threats

Public Safety Director Tom Casady said it was clear the threats were part of an international hoax.

Friday, December 14th 2018, 5:13 PM CST by Bayley Bischof

The tally of bomb threats received across Lincoln climbed into the teens as Friday morning rolled around.

16 total emails were received by schools, credit unions, car dealerships and more.

Casady said dispatch sends two police officers, a fire investigator, battalion chief and a fire investigator to bomb threat calls.

That's about nine first responders who have to spend about an hour figuring out whether or not a threat is legitimate.

That’s on a normal call, but what happened Thursday and Friday wasn’t run of the mill.

"We had an unusual situation in that we had an awful lot of these Thursday and a few more on Friday but pretty quickly realized they were part of a nationwide hoax,” Casady said.

Businesses across the nation got an email demanding businesses send $20,000 in Bitcoins or a bomb would explode in their office.

These threats were seen across the nation and even in Canada and New Zealand.

Prompting law enforcement across the country to take the same precautions Lincoln’s first responders had to multiple times in the last 48 hours.

"The problem with these though is you don't want to make assumptions, you want to err on the side of caution so the first few we handled like ordinary bomb threats."

Director Casady said as more and more calls came in, first responders had a smaller initial response, to see if the threat was related to the nationwide hoax.

"We'd just look at the text to see if it's the same as what's being reported around the country and in Lincoln to make sure if it's the same."

They were all identical. None of the threats were legitimate.

A Lincoln Police Investigator has been assigned to work with the FBI on this case. Director Casady said while the bureau has sophisticated technology to track people down, he's not confident the culprit will ever be found.